Arrival: City 8
by ToastyBacon
Summary: City 8; A stronghold of the Combine. The resistance and combine conflict is in tension and is almost upon the point of Uprising. Enter Desmond Forster; a Resistance-Oriented citizen formerly trying to get by each day, living on his knees at the time. The day of the tension breaking and the uprising begins draws closer, but what will happen?


**Let me tell you a story.**

**A story of oppression.**

What happens when science went too far. In the early 21st Century, the Black Mesa Corporation was mastering the teleporation methods, in the process rivalling Aperture Science's portal technology. In the process, Black Mesa discovered the Xen Borderworld, and amassed numerous crystals from this Borderworld, along the way discovering numerous species and running tests. Eventually, they used a crystal in a test so large and so risky they caused the Resonance Cascade, a event which created a portal in the facility from the Xen Borderworld, releasing hundreds of hostile, lethal species into the facility such as Vortigaunts, Headcrabs and Barnacles. Out of the few species that infilitrated the facility, the Vortigaunts were the most intelligent, now in our time being our allies in the revolution.

Along with the Xen creatures, there was also 'Race X', a under-researched race which came from a portal from Xen, which was from another area. The Race X creatures attacked late in the incident, when the Hazardous Environment Combat Unit and Black Ops Assassins 'cleaned up' the facility by covering up the incident by killing the scientists and security. For a majority of a decade, humanity waited in terror, waiting in their homes as more portals opened which released more Xen creatures and Race X species.

In the year 2010, after the 'Black Mesa Incident', the invasion of earth began through these portals, used by the invaders as a way to pull their entire empire's army in. The war lasted only 7 hours due to their sheer strength and other-wordly weaponry that simply outnumbered and outgunned us to the point that using tactics would be redundant. After our surrender, secured by the old Black Mesa interim administrator Wallace Breen, the invaders settled by enslaving humanity. With the bring of these new lifeforms came new technology and a new, suppressed lifestyle. However, the technology was rather not to enlighten our species, but to keep us in place; away from uprising, and to starve us and end us as a species whole.

For one, the world's food supplies stopped, the only food being given out were ration packets, filled with what seemed like the worst crap churned out into a slushy substance with some tapwater in a can. Citizens identities to the Union were merely numbers, someone dead was merely just a number gone to them, but to us, we were still a Peter, Tyler, Amanda or Bradley. With a new lifestyle, they brought the Metropolice Force to enforce their new ideals and laws, as well as the Overwatch Soldiers, a transhuman augmented army used as a new form of military to quell with the uprising. With our species being referred to numbers, so was our cities, their government buildings being a Nexus or a Citadel as the central metropolice and overwatch stronghold.

City 8. A place with the shell of deception. A death-trap that lays hold to the Asian Stronghold of the Universal Union. Who are the Union, you may ask? To people, that differs; If you ask one of these Stockholm Syndromed Zombies they call 'Loyalists', they'll call them the Liberators of humanity, and the saviours from the evident collapse of humanity. But, you ask the average citizen in private, they'll tell you of their suffering, the abductions of their family members for 'the greater good'. The loyalists? They're just blind to it all, desperate to save their families by joining the Metropolice Force.

Infact, eitherway, any place in the world which hasn't been moulded into one of these numbered statistics is a former-shadow of itself. By this, I mean it's literally a pile of rubble or abandoned, inhabited by small pockets of resistance which experiences the vicious cycle of growing too fast; But you know what they say, when a forest grows too big, a burning purge of fire follows behind it. The resistance usually gets one single person caught, the information released without effort; What follows is the entire resistance cell being murdered, massacred and gutted.

Anyhow, back to my story.

My story... started in City 8, a short few years after the occupation began once the cities began to be setup. I am Desmond Forster, born in New York City in the United States, I was 30 years old at the time, the year was 2017, and the train stopped.


End file.
